Yesterday on Nokia’s Navifirm servers evidently a new firmware update for the Lumia 920 briefly appeared. The current version for most users is the 1249 branch but this new version is of 1308 variety (1232.5957.1308.0004).

Unfortunately, the firmware is now off of the server meaning we personally cannot analyze it for changes. The good news is that some in our forums already did do some digging and there do appear to be changes to the camera for the better. In addition, new Storage options may give users a means to clear their Temporary cache on their Lumia.

In a nice comparison post, forum member Axefield did a before and after with the 920’s firmware (and even an iPhone 5) to show the differences. While it’s hard to know how well the conditions were controlled for, assuming they were it appears that the new 920 makes some adjustments to white balance and increases sharpness. This is especially evident in the third comparison with the flash on.

See more comparison shots below.

New Storage options and temp file deletion?

Other new features weren’t noted in our forums but on the popular social website Sina Weibo, two images have come out that show new Storage options on Windows Phone.

The image to the left shows the storage allocation with applications (green in the pic), media files (blue), OS (pink), blank (grey) in a nice, circular graph.

The second image, to the right, allows the user to go into more detail. The first bar is for “Applications” and in this example it takes up 417MB of storage. Below it is a button for “Details”, which presumably will bring the user to another screen for more information.

Below the Applications bar is one for “Temporary” files and in this image it reads 164MB of storage space. The potential big deal here is that Temporary files is coupled with a “Clear” button to dump and clean out your system cache.

The four bars at the bottom are "pictures: 7.9MB", "music + video: 906MB", "Office documents: 586KB", and "email + contacts: 52MB". It looks like you can't do anything about the last four in terms of management.

Recently, Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore tweeted that some improvements are coming to the “other” storage issue in future updates. This may be the first example of it.

If these camera and storage tweeks really come with an update soon, I think WP8 is slowly coming to be on par with the functionality totallity I've still been missing since Symbian. Deep skype integration is on its way somehow, brilliant.
Add to that a notification centre, and instagram and bbc iplayer, whcih seem to be deal-breakers for many, things are really looking up.

Great to see another update, but I still haven't recieved Portico on my developer edition 920 that I got from Build. Has anyone who has one of those recieved Portico yet? Can't really complain since I got such an awesome phone for free.

Could you explain that process? I've seen it mentioned where you can retrieve updates yourself but they required flashing your phone and sounded risky. Thus far I figured its safer and easier to just wait. The main thing I really want from Portico is probably the perpetual wifi on setting.

Now all we need is fixes for random restarts, hangs when using the "back" button, network issues, GPS overhaul for WP8/7x so it actually is up to the competition (and no, its not) and notifications that is notifying.
I forgotten anything?

Bad news: the storage management feature is tucked away around the end of the "Settings" menu, together with "extras + info", "display + touch", "Nokia account", etc, meaning it's more likely a Lumia-specific add-on developed by Nokia. Good news: the text in the screenshot reads quite like translated into Chinese from English, meaning this is probably the localized version of an international feature, and consequently it's coming to Lumia devices everywhere at least.

Is there a fix coming to Xbox Music+video app pretty soon? That thing is such a mess, I am thankful Spotify came to alleviate my frustration. Please, please bring back the Zune music app design; it was perfectly functional!!

funny how about a month or 2 goes by after portico update and there's lots of posts and whinges about MS leaving WP and not caring, then we get a day like this with all this news showing a handful of updates and new apps coming up and everyone's all happy again. i think sometimes we all just want update after update but we need to remember releasing updates is process that takes time. i doubt MS will ever throw in the towel on WP and we all just need to be patient.

Want to get to your updates? Start marchin!
Yo mama was there when you left
You're Right!
Yo daddy was there when you left
You're Right!
Yo mama yo daddy yo bald headed granny,
Your sister was there when you left
You're Right!

Guys hold on, it CLEARLY states gdr ........ wait for it..... BETA 2! The reason software goes through alpha and beta iterations is to weed out the said issues we're seeing in the comments. The general release may/ may not look like this beta version. All we can do is wait and let them get fixing the identified issues.